Thursday, December 19, 2013

Cordova 3.3 adds Ubuntu

Upstream Cordova 3.3.0 is released just in time for the holidays with a gift we can all appreciate: built-in Ubuntu support!

Cordova: multi-platform HTML5 apps

Apache Cordova is a framework for HTML5 app development that simplifies building and distributing HTML5 apps across multiple platforms, like Android and iOS. With Cordova 3.3.0, Ubuntu is an official platform!

The cool idea Cordova starts with is a single www/ app source directory tree that is built to different platforms for distribution. Behind the scenes, the app is built as needed for each target platform. You can develop your HTML5 app once and build it for many mobile platforms, with a single command.

With Cordova 3.3.0, one simply adds the Ubuntu platform, builds the app, and runs the Ubuntu app. This is done for Ubuntu with the same Cordova commands as for other platforms. Yes, it is as simple as:

Plugins

Cordova is a lot more than an HTML5 cross-platform web framework though.
It provides JavaScript APIs that enable HTML5 apps to use of platform specific back-end code to access a common set of devices and capabilities. For example, you can access device Events (battery status, physical button clicks, and etc.), Gelocation, and a lot more. This is the Cordova "plugin" feature.

You can add Cordova standard plugins to an app easily with commands like this:

$ cordova plugin add org.apache.cordova.battery-status(Optionally modify www/* to listen to the batterystatus event )$ cordova build [ ubuntu ]$ cordova run ubuntu
Keep an eye out for news about how Ubuntu click package cross compilation capabilities will soon weave together with Cordova to enable deployment of plugins that are compiled to specified target architecture, like the armhf architecture used in Ubuntu touch images (for phones, tablets and etc.).

Docs

As a side note, I'm happy to note that my documentation of initial Ubuntu platform support has landed and has been published at Cordova 3.3.0 docs.